The Outside

by Laura Bickle

  Jagged silhouettes of people pulled themselves from the grass, like spiders extricating from webs. I braced myself, clutching my puny staff. Their eyes swept up the hill. I expected them to rush to us like water in a trench after a rainstorm.

  They reached up with pale fingers that smelled like metal. Their lips drew back, hissing, and I could see the thirst in their eyes. But they made no move to climb the hill.

  I sidled closer to Alex. “What’s stopping them?”

  “Holy ground,” he said, grinning.

  My brows drew together. I didn’t understand. I saw no sign of any human habitation here. No church. No graveyard. Just this oddly shaped hill that rose up out of the field.

  “How?”

  Ginger started laughing behind me. She turned on her heel and surveyed the sad little hillock. “I see it now,” she said. She huddled in closer with us when a vampire snarled at her.

  “See what?”

  “We’re on an Indian mound,” Alex said. “A holy site built by any one of a number of tribes in this area. They were used as burial mounds, ceremonial sites, astronomical measure- ments . . . some, we have no idea what for.”

  “How did you know?” It looked like just a rill in the land to me. A bump.

  “See how it’s sorta shaped like a snake?” He gestured to the west. “It’s hard to see underneath the tall grass, but notice how it undulates in the ground?” He swished his hand back and forth like a snake swimming, and I could see some of the suggestion of a reptile in it.

  “I saw a mound one time that was shaped like a big serpent eating the moon.” He cocked his head and started to walk off down the snake’s back. “I wonder if this one is like that . . .”

  Ginger snagged the back collar of his jacket. “No exploring in the dark with the monsters down below.”

  “What do we do now?” I leaned on my staff. The hissing and bright eyes below were unnerving. Pale fingers combed through the grass.

  Alex sat down. “We wait for morning.”

  I sighed and knelt down to pray. I could feel the chill of the earth beneath my knees, dew gathering. My skin crawled at the thought of the creatures, only feet away. I shut my eyes, trying to prove that I trusted God. He had kept us safe so far. He would keep us safe as long as it suited his purposes.

  That was part of what I believed—what the Amish believed. We believed in Gelassenheit—surrendering ourselves to God’s will. It was difficult, at times like this. I struggled to keep my eyes closed, seeing crescents of light beneath my lashes; I could not quite make myself trust the darkness.

  “Unser Vadder im Himmel . . .

  . . . dei Naame loss heilich sei . . .”

  “Damn. I wish I had a harmonica,” Alex grumbled.

  CHAPTER TWO

  One does not sleep in the presence of evil. Not when you can see it and it can see you.

  We sat on the top of the hill and watched the stars spin overhead. It’s funny the way that they shone as they always did. I took some comfort in that, that heaven was still the same as it always was. Watching, but remote.

  The all-purpose prayer of the Amish was the Lord’s Prayer, recited in Deitsch. It was vanity and belligerence to ask God for anything. But I couldn’t help it. I had too many questions:

  Is this the end of the world, as you meant it to be?

  Where is the Rapture, this thing that was spoken of so often by the Englishers?

  Did you forget us, or did you deem us unworthy?

  I knew that God was still here, that his power was felt on the evil in the world. Holy symbols and places kept us safe from the plague of vampires that had been released weeks ago. We didn’t know how or why. I had heard snippets from Ginger’s cell phone and radio. We had been safe in my little Amish settlement. We had believed ourselves to be protected from evil. That we were favored among God’s people.

  We had committed the sin of pride.

  The evil infected our community. Ginger, Alex, and I had fought it, in our own ways. We had the help of the village Hexenmeister, the man that Alex called our “wizard,” the man who painted our hex signs and who had the authority to write Himmelsbriefen.

  And it wasn’t just the evil of the vampires. It was the evil of man. The Amish Elders, in attempting to quash panic, kept a stranglehold on the community and denied the truth. Ginger, Alex, and I had been shunned, thrown out of Amish land and into the world to certain death.

  I missed home. I missed my mother, my father, my sister. I wondered if they would survive. If the Hexenmeister, who had stayed behind, would be able to protect them. My vision blurred when I thought of them, and I wiped away tears with my knuckles. I was not the only one who had lost.

  Alex knelt at the edge of the hill, sharpening his knife with a rock. The flash of the silver illuminated a hardness in his jaw that I had come to recognize when he was thinking of those he’d loved who had been killed. I didn’t ask about his old girlfriend, Cassia. We were both, in many ways, forced to move past that.

  Instead, I placed my hands in his blond hair and kissed the top of his head. His jaw softened. He reached up for my hand with the one that wasn’t holding the knife.

  Ginger was huddled with her arms around her knees, hands tucked into her sleeves. Unblinking, she stared through her glasses at the creatures clamoring below. Most of it was inarticulate hissing and howling, but phrases could still be heard:

  “Come here. Let me release you.”

  “Pretty thing. You can’t run forever.”

  “Nothing can protect you. We are legions of legions, and you are so very few.”

  “Aren’t you tired of fighting? I promise that it won’t hurt.”

  I sat beside her, put my arm around her shoulders. I didn’t want her staring at them for long. They had the power to reason, and also a kind of glamour. Though we were theoretically shielded from them on this hill, I didn’t want her to be tempted. And I didn’t want her to begin to view them as people.

  She reached up to rub her eyes beneath her glasses. “I keep thinking,” she said. “About Dan and the kids, that . . .” She gestured to the twisted faces below.

  I squeezed her shoulders. “That hasn’t happened to them. Dan’s safe with the other soldiers. And your daughter is at the kibbutz in California with her friends.”

  “But my son . . .” She shook her head. “The college surely doesn’t know how to deal with this. Didn’t,” she amended.

  “He’s smart. And Dan is looking for them.” That was the last we had heard. Before the Elders had destroyed Ginger’s cell phone as a symbol of the contagion from Outside. Before the end of the world, Ginger had been visiting, and she was accidentally trapped in our settlement when the end had come.

  “I hope . . .” She fell silent. Articulating hopes in this world seemed futile.

  Hands in the darkness crooked toward her, beckoning.

  “God is watching,” I said firmly.

  The eastern horizon grew pink and the stars began to fade. As gold began to lighten the undersides of clouds, the vampires started to slip away, like pale eels. They growled and snarled as they receded, sliding into the protective shade of the tall grass. Horace blew and snorted at them.

  I tipped my face to the sun, feeling its light upon my skin. I scrubbed my fingers through my hair, wanting it to soak into my pores. The sun felt like love. I unpinned the Himmelsbrief from my breast and folded it carefully away in my pocket for safekeeping.

  I prayed again, as I always did: at dawn and sunset. At sunset, I prayed for protection. At dawn, I prayed in thanksgiving that we had lived to see it once again.

  “We should get moving,” Alex said. He stood and shifted his weight from foot to foot. “Get as far from them as we can before nightfall, lose the scent.”

  I wearily climbed to my feet.

  “How far today?” I asked. We had decided to go north, to Canada. Alex had family there. Perhaps vainly, we hoped that the contamination hadn’t spread as quickly in sparsely populated areas.r />
  He squinted north. “As far as we can get before the sun goes down.”

  ***

  “Do you think that it will always be this way?”

  I heard hopelessness creep into Ginger’s voice. We’d convinced her to climb up into Horace’s saddle to save time while Alex and I walked. Her fingers were tangled in the horse’s white mane and the reins, and her gaze between its ears was unfocused.

  “No,” I said. “The Rapture is brief. Then there are the Tribulations before the Second Coming of Christ.”

  “I must have missed the Rapture part,” Ginger said, bitterly.

  “We don’t know that,” I insisted. “Some people could have been taken away to heaven.” But I didn’t really believe it. Though the world seemed empty, it seemed its inhabitants had been taken by darker forces.

  “I wonder how many people were seriously expecting to be taken away from this,” Alex said. He walked through the sunlit grass with his hands jammed in his pockets. “Did they just sit down and pray, waiting? Why?”

  It was in his nature to question. He had been an anthropology graduate student before the end of the world came. He knew almost as much about the Bible as I did, but viewed it through the lens of a curious detachment, as an artifact and not the word of God.

  I frowned. “I don’t know how many righteous children of God there are. I thought . . . I thought that we were faithful.” I squinted up at the sun. “I thought that my community was good. That we were doing as God commanded us. We followed the Ordnung, the rules.”

  “I thought so too, Katie,” Ginger said. “We were all safe there . . . well, in our way,” she amended, glancing at Alex. Ginger had been safe until the Elders had caught her contacting the Outside world with a cell phone, had been accused of going mad. A bit of that had been true. She’d been safe as long as she was quiet and said nothing.

  “They just locked you in a room,” he said. “Me, they threw out, once they found me.”

  “That was my fault,” I said. I violated the Elders’ rules. They ordered that no one was to come into or leave the settlement. Alex was hurt when I found him. I brought him inside, and pulled the wrath of the Elders down on all our heads. And I had done more than that. I had lain with him, and they had discovered us. I had used up my virtue on an English man outside the bonds of marriage.

  He kicked a stone. “I feel bad for that. You’d still be safe there if it wasn’t for me.”

  I shook my head. “No. The vampires had come in anyway.” That was the fault of a boy I’d been intending on marrying. A boy who saw the brothers he thought were dead resurrected as vampires beyond the fence, and foolishly let them in. Elijah had betrayed me, turned away from me and toward something I didn’t understand. I was pretty sure it wasn’t God.

  “The ground is no longer holy,” I lamented.

  But I still ached for home. Before the end of the world, I could not wait for my Rumspringa, the testing of the Outside world. I was looking forward to being able to experience a different kind of life. Sit in a movie theater. Wear jeans. Perhaps learn to drive a car. And now . . . now that I was in the Outside world, it was more fearsome and terrible than I ever could have imagined.

  I remembered when we’d been exiled, when we had been cast beyond the gate of my community. My family and the Elders had watched. I felt their sorrow pressing against my back as we walked down that dirt road with the horse, feeling the horizon too large before us and my familiar life shrinking behind.

  I shook my head. “Something happened. I don’t understand. It wasn’t just that the vampires glamoured their way in. Something changed in our land.”

  “Evil,” Alex said. “Not just the contagion. When people are forced into a crucible like that, they start biting each other like rats. Power becomes an end unto itself. Evil is an inevitable sociological fact.”

  I frowned. I could not dispute that idea with logic. “I don’t believe that everyone is corruptible.”

  “Everyone is corruptible. We all just have different limits.”

  We walked in silence for some time before Ginger said: “How many do you think have survived? If this is a biblical thing?”

  I knew that she wanted comfort. She wanted to believe that her husband and children were alive. Just as Alex wanted to believe that his parents were. As I wanted to believe that my parents and sister would live.

  “Revelations says that a third of mankind will be killed.” I couldn’t lie to her. That was what the book said, but doubts crept in on me. “The rest will flee to the mountains. There will be the End Times of Tribulation, and then Jesus will cast Satan out for a thousand years.”

  “The idea of End Times isn’t specific to Christianity,” Alex said. “Islam, for instance, believes in a Judgment Day. At that time, terrible creatures called the Gog and Magog will slaughter everything they can get their hands on.”

  “Sounds familiar,” Ginger said.

  “There’s also the idea that a mystical smoke will descend on the earth. Nonbelievers are stricken with grave illness, and believers only get a case of the sniffles. Allah then sweeps a wind over the earth, which steals away the lives of the believers, leaving the nonbelievers behind until judgment.

  “Mormonism has the idea that darkness will cover the earth, and that the evil will burn in fire.”

  “If we were only that lucky,” Ginger muttered.

  “Hinduism believes that there’s a cyclic life and death in the world, moving from purity to impurity. It’s not really an End Times in the Western Protestant sense, but there’s also the idea in Buddhism that the teachings of Buddha will be forgotten and that people will degenerate into a destructive cycle until the appearance of the next Buddha,” Alex said. “So there may be some grain of truth in many traditions about what’s happening here.”

  “I struggle with this,” I said frankly. “I know that this keeps me safe.” I patted the pocket containing the Himmelsbrief. “But your tattoos also keep you safe.”

  “And before communications were cut off to the rest of the world, we knew that people were safe at the mosques, Shinto shrines, synagogues, temples,” Ginger said. I’d fallen back to walk beside her heel, and she leaned over to pick bits of grass from my hair. Motherly fussing. It felt normal, and I relished it.

  “I’m struggling with it too,” Alex said, scratching self-consciously at his chest. “I never thought I really believed in God, deep, down deep, like you do.” He gazed at me with eyes the color of winter skies. “I’ve got a healthy respect for the religion of ancient Egypt, you know. But nobody really practices it anymore. It is, for me . . . an intellectual curiosity, I guess. The idea that Osiris rose from the dead, that there is some concept of eternal life . . .”

  “But you believe, in some fashion,” I said. “Or else it wouldn’t work.” I touched the back of his hand. “I guess I don’t understand how we can come from such different perspectives and have the same result.”

  I was accustomed to thinking that there was one right way to live, one way to achieve favor. “Evil” for me had been a broad category once upon a time. Evil had included transgressions great and small, from murder to failure to submit to God’s will with grace to immodest dress. Now . . . now I found that my definition of evil was shrinking. I feared that rather than rising to the challenge of the Tribulations and becoming strong in my faith, I was growing weaker. Decaying, like the rest of the world. And that frightened me.

  His fingers closed around mine. “I don’t know,” he said helplessly. “But it works.”

  In some ways, I think that I loved him.

  And I shouldn’t have.

  He was an Englisher. Wholly inappropriate, based on just that fact. He wasn’t even Christian. He was older than I was, by a handful of years. Worldlier. He had seen and experienced things I couldn’t even imagine: the ocean, airplanes, computers. His world had been much bigger than mine, glamorous and exciting.

  But now our world was the same: bleak and frightening.

&
nbsp; Alex shook his head. “In the Gnostics’ Gospel of Thomas, Jesus said: ‘If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.’ What’s in me is not gonna save anyone.”

  I gazed at him. “I believe that what you have within you is good and beautiful.”

  “I wish I could believe that,” he said. I heard the doubt and fear in his voice.

  “I believe for you,” I said.

  ***

  The sun always seemed to move too fast.

  Growing up Plain, I had always been conscious of the sun. We rose with it, conducted all our business under its light. The cows were milked, fields plowed and harvested, and animals fed with its warmth on our faces. We went to bed when it set, when the crickets and spring peeper frogs emerged in the warmer seasons. During the short days of winter, we would sometimes play checkers by lamplight for an hour before submitting to the moonlit darkness muffled by snow.

  This was the same, but different. Then, it had been an easy connection to nature. We told time in the fields by squinting at the sun. I still did, in fields not so different from those, but for much different reasons. I could feel Darkness bearing down on us, behind every shadow and patch of shade.

  We were running. There was no objective other than simple survival now. No livestock that needed us to care for them, no fruit that would rot on the vine without our intervention. We just needed to find enough to eat and keep from being eaten.

  We waded through the fields until the sun pushed our shadows long to the right of us. I shivered, with the knowledge not only that night would come soon, but that frost was coming. Frost would kill the last of the blackberries and gooseberries that I’d found for us to subsist on. The acorns were long gone. I’d been lucky to find a crab apple tree three days ago, but I didn’t think that we’d be that fortunate again. The animals, like birds and squirrels, who had been accustomed to scavenging the leftovers of humans, were now stripping trees and bushes bare.